To the Editor:
If you were ever laid off and your meager unemployment benefits are running out; if you don’t know how to feed your kids and hang on to your house, then you understand why so many Americans are angry and ready to lash out at someone to blame.
I can only empathize with, indeed share their anger, but if we are ever to emerge from our national predicament of 9.8 percent official (in real terms more like 20 percent) unemployment, it would be useful to direct that anger at the right targets and act it out in the voting booth and beyond in constructive ways.
When it comes to jobs, it is worth looking at the record, beginning with the past decade that, for the first time since the Great Depression, produced zero job growth in the United States. Zero. A number, shocking enough, that looks even worse in comparison with the preceding six decades, none of which registered job growth under 20 percent.
Take the 1970s, often remembered as a time of economic stagflation and political “malaise”. The seventies produced a 27 percent growth in American jobs. That was down four percent from the 1960s, enough of a drop to catapult Ronald Reagan into the White House and “government [to become] the problem.”
Taxes were cut, deregulation started, “free markets” idealized. Yet the 1980s produced a growth of only 20 percent in U.S. jobs. Globalization accelerated and with it America’s de-industrialization.
Clinton’s 1990s, – some taxes raised, “free trade” agreements and deregulation still continued, but the nation’s deficit erased – managed only to hold the line with the same 20 percent job growth.
The first decade of the 21st Century brought with it more tax cuts, more deregulation and greater faith in “free trade” – and, finally, zero percent job growth.
That pitiable statistic, need I say, is not an isolated fluke. Economic output slowed to 17.8 percent in the 2000s, the slowest it has been since the 1930s and less that half of the 38.1 percent increase during the much maligned 1970s. Household net worth, which rose 28 percent in the 1970s, declined 4 percent.
At the end of Carter’s presidency the total federal debt was $909 billion. By the end of the first Bush administration it quadrupled, then declined. Bill Clinton left the presidency with a $236 billion federal budget surplus.
Two open-ended wars and more tax cuts later, the second Bush administration left an inheritance of $1.3 trillion annual budget deficit and a total federal debt of $10.3 trillion, mostly owed to China and other foreign interests.
I draw two lessons from all this, although there are more.
First, before I vote, I must consider the likely policies of the candidates rather than merely their party affiliation, personal appeal or repeal. Second, regardless of who is in office, my job as a citizen is to relentlessly pressure the president and Congress to create and enforce policies that work for the greatest number of people in American society. That’s what they are there for and I must think, talk and organize around that fact as a citizen of a democracy.
Is Obama blameless? Is the Democratic majority Congress? No. Leaving the racist and the silly nonsense of the President’s detractors aside, policy priorities could have been better. After all, Wall Street operators responsible for our current economic malaise have been made whole while millions of un- and underemployed workers have not.
The country continues to spend over 4 percent of our gross domestic product on the military while our infrastructure is falling apart, our workers are laid off and our college graduates are forced to move back to mom and dad’s. We are collective victims of an expanded yet unwinnable war in Afghanistan and sliding toward another in Pakistan.
We ended up with a much too compromised health care law that nobody likes, even though it is a marginal improvement over the status quo. There has been insufficient focus on creating jobs, and the list goes on.
Still, each government failure is also mine – ours. We bicker amongst ourselves, along party and silly ideological lines. We allow demagogues that occupy our public square and media to define the terms of our public discourse. We make up scores of excuses for staying away from voting, and after we vote, we disappear from public affairs, leaving it up to “them,” except for complaining when things don’t go our way: we lose our jobs, our houses – or about those loose-loose wars “they” started in our name.
OK, so we have an outdated model of (Wall Street) capitalism that failed us. We have an in many ways corrupt and impotent system of government. A powerful military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about decades ago and that we did nothing to reign in. There is, to say the least, room for improvement wherever we look. Yet even when we elect people we like, we fail to hold their feet to the fire to make sure they do our collective bidding, once in office.
Back to jobs. It is fascinating to read about Germany having had its best economic growth year since reunification. Now, in the midst of the worldwide economic slump, there is hiring going on. Their modern “craft-manufacturing” and their renewable energy sector are booming. They are building high speed rail, maintain a splendid infrastructure, have universal health care, virtually free education through the university level, homes which need no heating system and more. A country with those things can evidently still create jobs. (By the way, Germany has a conservative government.)
Why not the United States? – Think about this as you weigh whom to vote for this November.
Paul F. Kando, Damariscotta
